March 2014

March 31, 2014

As a new biopic about Cesar Chavez arrives in theaters just in time for Cesar Chavez Day, a collaboration between American Literature and Scalar (a multimedia authoring and publishing web platform developed by the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture) draws our attention to Chavez’s own interest in film as a revolutionary technology for farm-worker activism. Curtis Marez’s Scalar project “Cesar Chavez’s Video Collection” is part of American Literature’s special issue on New Media and American Literature (December 2013, 85:4). Comprising a traditional print volume and four open-access digital projects, the issue is the first collaboration of its kind for the journal.

Read an excerpt:

The fact that technology has been both an object and means of farm-worker media making has encouraged self-reflexive strategic efforts to transform postwar visual culture. Farm-worker unions did not simply change what audiences saw, but instead attempted to alter how they saw agribusiness, intervening in the hierarchical relations of looking that structured the agribusiness-dominated mediascape, and instead promoting new kinds of activist spectatorship among farm workers and their supporters. This project thus focuses on struggles over technology in general and visual technologies in particular, including moving picture cameras, video cameras and players, and computer screens.

“Cesar Chavez’s Video Collection” is an offshoot of Marez’s book Speculative Technologies: Migrant Workers and the Hidden History of New Media (forthcoming, Duke University Press), and is available on the Scalar platform here.

March 28, 2014

Gear up for the start of baseball season next week with a scintillating read from the newest issue of Labor: Sarah F. Rose's and Joshua A. T. Salzmann's "Bionic Ballplayers: Risk, Profit, and the Body as Commodity, 1964-2007."

Read an excerpt:

I was nervous.... [My roommate] and I went into my bedroom. I pulled down my shorts and rubbed a cotton swab over a spot on my right [butt] cheek. It’s an inch-and-a-half needle, and you want to make sure it’s in the muscle tissue. You gotta make your muscle totally relaxed, so I made my right leg as limp as I could. Then he poked me. — Anonymous professional baseball player

By the turn of the twenty-first century, scenes like this had become commonplace, as many ballplayers took anabolic steroids, human growth hormone, and other substances to enhance their performance and reduce wear and tear on their bodies. These bodily interventions have brought widespread moral condemnation. In 2002, Texas Rangers pitcher Kenny Rogers, for instance, voiced common ethical objections to steroid use, explaining, 'My belief is that God gave you a certain amount of ability, and I don't want to enhance it by doing something that is not natural and creates and unfair advantage.' Similar condemnations came from outside players' ranks, notably in the Mitchell Commission's 2007 report on steroid use in Major League Baseball, which condemned steroid users for violating federal law and 'distort[ing] the fairness of competition.' This repeated focus on ballplayers' personal immorality, however, has led Mitchell and other commentators to take their eye off the ball, namely, the changing dynamics of the business of baseball.

To continue "Bionic Ballplayers," click here. To read the introduction to the issue and browse the table of contents, click here.

Alain Resnais has died, has vanished from the earth. The French filmmaker is known for his documentaries (including his 1955 Night and Fog on Nazi concentration camps) and feature films (including his 1959 Hiroshima mon amour, a film about making a film about Hiroshima, which is also a love story). Resnais has died on the heels of his friend and sometimes film collaborator Chris Marker (July 29, 1921-July 30, 2012). Resnias's documentary film All the Memory of the World (1956), which turns the pages of memory as collected in the Bibliothèque Nationale, received assistance from Marker. All the Memory of the World follows a book, like the life of a man, like the telling of a story, from A to B: from its arrival at the great library, to its imprisonment on the shelf, to its release when checked out.

Resnais received a movie camera from his parents for his twelfth birthday and discovered Marcel Proust when he was fourteen: with these tools in hand, he would spend a lifetime making work on not forgetting. What does it mean to forget? As Harald Weinrich has written in his fine Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting (1997): "The verb 'forget' is composed of the verb 'get' and the prefix 'for'. The prefix converts the movement toward implicit in 'get' into a movement away, so that one might paraphrase the meaning of 'forget' as 'to get rid (of something)."

Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour (with a screenplay by Marguerite Duras) is a devastatingly beautiful film of skin, pleasure, pain and never forgetting. As I write in Black and Blue:

The opening scene of Hiroshima mon amour is a scene of skin as both pleasure and pain. As Goethe writes of Pompeii in his Italian Journey: “There have been many disasters in this world, but few which have given so much delight to posterity, and I have seldom seen anything so interest opening, which, when watched, has the curious effect of slowness. Hiroshima mon amour is a double circle, taking place over a period of twenty- four hours: it is the clock going round to twelve o’clock once, and then round again to twelve o’clock one more time. The film moves round and round through one day and one night. As Jacques Rivette has noted: “At the end of the last reel you can easily move back to the first, and so on . . . It is an idea of the infinite but contained within a very short interval, since ultimately the ‘time’ of Hiroshima can just as well last twenty- four hours as one second." Hiroshima mon amour is ostensibly the story of a love affair between a Japanese architect (or engineer), who lives in Hiroshima, and a French actress, who lives in Nevers, France. The actress has come to Hiroshima to star in a film about peace. (Just as Proust’s Recherche is a novel about writing a novel, Hiroshima mon amour is a film about making a film.) Never do we get the Japanese architect’s actual name. Never do we get the French actress’s actual name. He is just lui from Hiroshima. She is just elle from Nevers. “The time is summer, 1957—August.” Resnais chose the setting of Nevers because he liked the sound of the name, which, of course, has a special, if foreboding, resonance in English. (Black and Blue, pages 117-118)

places for the fingers and eyes to slip into, as if the body were nothing more, nothing less, than a lavishly photographed, sexual/erotic bell pepper, seashell, cabbage, artichoke, or mushroom

I will never forget Resnais. I have an inconsolable memory of Resnais. My memory is circular, refuses to go from A to B, will not be imprisoned or checked out. My memory of Resnais remains insoluble, untouched by Lethe: the twisting stream of forgetfulness. My memory is as round and as warm and as insoluble as the marble, hot with summer, that rolls into the dark cellar that imprisons the captured woman (ELLE), who comes from Nevers (France).

In Gaston Bachelard’s famed work The Poetics of Space, we learn that “images of full roundness help us to collect ourselves, permit us to confer an initial constitution on ourselves, and to confirm our being intimately inside . . . being cannot be otherwise than round.” It is the earth, the pregnant belly, the nest, the pupil of the eye, the open mouth, the circle of time. In a round cry of the round, Bachelard echoes that roundness is “like a walnut that becomes round in its shell.” The marble, then, in the hands and eyes of Bachelard’s poetics, becomes the image of life itself. As Duras writes about the marble in Hiroshima mon amour: “So much roundness, so much perfection, posed an insoluble problem.” The marble rolls on. The marble resists. It carries summer past, present, and future. (Black and Blue, pages 131-132)

Her head mirrors the heads of those left bald by the bomb's atomic radiation, the shaven heads of concentration camps, the smooth head of Joan of Arc (who is from a town not far from Nevers): mirroring the world, the marble, the circularity of the non-linear story of Hiroshima mon amour

People were buzzing about Eugenie Brinkema's fabulous talk "Order and the List: 'Final Destination' and Death by Design" and everyone wanted to buy her new book The Forms of the Affects. We sold out of them quickly, but not before she got a chance to pose with it.

Eric Schaefer met his book Sex Scene for the first time at the conference. Many of the contributors stopped by to check it out, too. You can read excerpts from it in Salon and PopMatters.

March 21, 2014

Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recordingargues that, following John Cage, new genres in experimental and avant-garde music in the 1960s actively thwarted the form of the LP. These activities include indeterminate music, long-duration minimalism, text scores, happenings, live electronic music, free jazz, and free improvisation. How could mercurial performance practices such as these adequately be represented on an album?

And yet, like it or not, present-day listeners’ understanding of experimental music from the 1960s increasingly has come to rely on recordings. Distaste for recordings as imperfect representations has come to be recognized as a period attitude of the 1960s. In their day, surprisingly few of these works were available in recorded form. By contrast, contemporary listeners can encounter works not only through a flood LP and CD releases of archival recordings, but also in greater volume through Internet file-sharing and online resources such as UbuWeb, DRAM, and Archive.org. Records Ruin the Landscape considers the odd fact of listeners coming to know a period through the recorded artifacts of composers and musicians that largely disavowed recordings.

In this spirit, what follows is a brief, annotated itinerary of recordings that have not always been at one’s fingertips.

It can seem that in the 1960s nearly everyone was eager to voice an opinion about John Cage. A fascinating, emblematic, and deeply strange artifact of this period is this radio interview with Cage by nineteen year-old Jonathan Cott, who would later become an editor at Rolling Stone. The audibly nervous Cott begins by reading a voluminous, confrontational quasi-question containing two lengthy quotations about Cage that are not critical so much as they are fundamentally dismissive. It’s a prime example of an anti-Cage backlash in full swing—as well as a remarkable document of teen chutzpah.

This recording comes from a January 1965 concert (on David Tudor’s 39th birthday) at the San Francisco Museum of Art that was recorded by the radio station KPFA; the recording was never commercially released, and remained unavailable until it was posted online as part of the Other Minds Audio Archive. A different concert recording of Variations IV from later in 1965 appeared on the Everest label. This concert of live electronic music finds Cage and Tudor enjoying themselves in a cacophonous, heterogeneous, difficult-to-map sonic terrain.

Pauline Oliveros is a composer whose work is currently available on dozens of commercially-released recordings, but before 1970 her music was represented exclusively by her contributions to two Music of Our Time compilation albums: Extended Voices and New Sounds in Electronic Music. Sound Patterns, her piece on Extended Voices, lasts a fleeting four minutes. By contrast, to celebrate Oliveros’s 80th birthday in 2012, Important Records released Reverberations, a 12-CD collection containing more than ten hours of her largely unreleased tape and electronic music from the 1960s, beginning with a 1961 work of musique concrète that utilizes recordings made in her bathtub and moving through thirty-four subsequent works created in that decade.

It used to be that if you were interested in Max Neuhaus’s realizations of music by Cage, Stockhausen, Earle Brown, and Morton Feldman, you would have had to pay dearly for an out-of-print copy of his 1968 LP Electronics and Percussion: Five Realizations from Columbia Records’ Music of Our Time series. It’s a marvel that Neuhaus’s work was even represented on a major label; surely this ranks as one of the most abrasive and one of the most dynamically extreme records ever released by Columbia. Neuhaus’s performance of Morton Feldman’s The King of Denmark is aptly and marvelously hushed, and the label did justice to the piece by not significantly raising its volume level in the mastering process.

With the single exception of a cassette released in 1986 in an edition of 350 copies, Henry Flynt’s music didn’t see commercial release until the twenty-first century. And then, at the century’s turn, the floodwall gave. Within three years, three American independent record labels had released ten compact discs featuring hours upon hours of archival recordings of Flynt’s music. Terms like “personal,” “informal,” and “solitary” are aptly descriptive of the two volumes of Back Porch Hillbilly Blues (recorded in the early and mid-1960s, but first released in 2002), home-quality solo recordings for violin, ukulele, guitar, and occasional vocal accompaniment, in which Flynt’s voice veers between the gentle, wordless moan of “Blue Sky, Highway and Tyme” and the extremely nasal, high-lonesome wail of “Sky Turned Red.”

If the year is 1970 and you’ve heard tell of Derek Bailey’s curious manner of playing the guitar and would like to judge for yourself but can’t make it out to his weekly gigs in London, you would also have had the option of sitting down and spending time with Incus Records LP1, the album The Topography of the Lungs by the trio of Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, and Han Bennink. But when you do so, each listen increasingly resolves into something closer to a musical composition those tempestuously brittle, battling slivers of sound that otherwise arrive prefractured in a thousand sizes, shapes, and velocities. Quoth Bailey: “Recording’s fine if it wasn’t for fucking records.”

David Grubbs is Associate Professor in the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, where he also teaches in the MFA programs in Performance and Interactive Media Arts and Creative Writing. As a musician, he has released twelve solo albums and appeared on more than 150 commercially released recordings. Grubbs was a founding member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, and has appeared on recordings by the Red Krayola, Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, Will Oldham, and Matmos, among other artists. He is known for cross-disciplinary collaborations with the writers Susan Howe and Rick Moody and the visual artists Anthony McCall, Angela Bulloch, and Stephen Prina. A grant recipient in music/sound from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Grubbs has written for The Wire, Bookforum, and the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

March 19, 2014

Kirsten Weld is Assistant Professor of History at Harvard University. In 2005, human rights investigators stumbled on the archives of Guatemala's National Police. In her new book, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala, Weld tells the story of the astonishing discovery and rescue of 75 million pages of evidence of state-sponsored crimes, and analyzes the repercussions for both the people and the state of Guatemala.

This book centers on the discovery and rescue of a massive police archive produced during Guatemala’s thirty-six years of civil war, from 1960-1996. Tell us how this discovery came about. How did you come to be involved?

The discovery of the archives was, quite literally, explosive. Nobody knew that these files still existed, because the administration that signed the Peace Accords took deliberate steps to keep them secret. But one night in June 2005, a four-hour-long series of blasts rocked Guatemala City: a cache of munitions left over from the civil war, stored in frightful conditions on an urban army base, accidentally ignited, showering shrapnel and spewing toxic smoke into the surrounding neighborhoods. Urban legend had it that there was a similar weapons storage problem at a nearby police base, so local residents demanded preventative action. But when investigators from the human rights ombudsman’s office showed up at the police base, they found something even more incendiary than bombs and guns: rooms upon rooms heaped with old papers. They realized that they had found the lost archives of the infamous National Police.

Initially, though, the archives posed more questions than they answered. Who would take custody of this enormous, 75-million-page body of records documenting over a century’s worth of tense, bloody history? Who would do the work to rescue the archives from the rot and abandon to which they’d been consigned, and who would pay for it? What would be the repercussions of reopening a conversation about postwar justice and memory in a country where those who dared to speak of the past were still routinely threatened or killed? What secrets would emerge from the archives?

Slowly, and against all the odds, the outlines of an ad-hoc project to clean, organize, and analyze the files came into being. About eight months into what was then still a shaky, fledgling initiative, I contacted its leaders and floated the possibility of writing a book chronicling their efforts. Believing, I think, that it might provide some extra measure of security to have a foreign observer on-site making a case for the importance of the work they were doing, they agreed to let me join the project as a volunteer, making me the only foreigner to work as a rank-and-file member of the archival recovery team.

No doubt reactions to this discovery were varied and complex. How have the people and government in Guatemala responded?

The competing reactions reflected the deep polarization of postwar Guatemalan society. Human rights organizations, advocates of postwar justice, and what remained of the old Left were thrilled, hopeful that this enormous cache of files could be used as evidence in war crimes trials and could help clarify the fates of some of the country’s many desaparecidos, or disappeared people. Conservative sectors studiously ignored the discovery—publicly, at least— but the efforts to rescue the archives faced attacks on multiple fronts, ranging from intimidation to arson attempts. Unknown assailants hurled Molotov cocktails into the archives site on numerous occasions. Workers at the archives project were, in some cases, spied on and harassed. Immense amounts of political pressure were deployed in an attempt to block any revelations that might implicate former police or military officials in crimes against humanity. But because the archival rescue project has managed to achieve major visibility both nationally and internationally, it has thus far survived.

What happened to the people documented in the archive? Did any of them survive? Since its discovery, have any of the victims documented come forward?

Many did survive. These files are, after all, the administrative archives of the police, so they contain traffic tickets, noise citations, personnel registries, and other bureaucratic ephemera documenting the regular churn of urban life. That said, however, many other individuals whose names appear in the files were indeed killed by state security forces, even though the records themselves tend to be circumspect on this front—a police report will state that someone was killed by “unknown individuals” or in a “traffic accident,” even when the forensic and eyewitness evidence strongly indicates otherwise. So analysts need to triangulate the information contained in the files with data from other sources, including newspaper reports, oral testimonies, and US government documents. One of the most important tasks underway right now, in collaboration with forensic anthropologists, is to try and match the new documentary evidence about people who were buried anonymously in the country’s many common graves with the DNA evidence currently being exhumed from those graves. The idea is to return the physical remains of the dead and disappeared to their surviving family members.

Survivors have flocked to the archives in search of information about their lost loved ones, but others, we have to assume, stay away, because they fear reprisals or for other reasons. Importantly, many of the people staffing the archival rescue project have personal connections to the people in the files, whether because of their own past political involvement or just because of how pervasively the civil war impacted daily life. So it’s common for those staff to stumble across references to friends, acquaintances, and family members during the course of a day’s work at the archives. As you can imagine, and as the book discusses in detail, that’s a very powerful and complex emotional experience.

March 17, 2014

People all over the world are celebrating St. Patrick's Day today. Brush up on your Irish history with Suellen Hoy's "The Irish Girls' Rising: Building the Women's Labor Movement in Progressive-Era Chicago" from Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas (volume 9, issue 1; Spring 2012).

Read an excerpt:

Hannah O’Day was the thirty-year-old Irish 'girl' who, with red flag raised, led a march of approximately seventy-five young women out of the canning department of the Chicago packinghouse of Libby, McNeill & Libby on February 5, 1900. Although hardly a girl, O’Day was not married and lived, as did many single Irish women, with her family (a brother and his wife, in this case). She was an old-timer who had worked at the yards since she was eleven years old and at the Libby plant for the past twelve years. While it is not known if she had walked out before, there is no doubt that on this cold, cloudy February morning O’Day led a group of coworkers, most of them Irish and likely Catholic, in a ragtag parade through the yards and into the street. They acted spontaneously and boldly. They clearly had had enough.

This incident is one of many strikes in the first decades of the twentieth century that demonstrate a concerted resolve by working women to secure economic and social justice for themselves and those who came after them. However, the stockyard strike of 1900, the earliest of many that would follow, was a pivotal event that has been neglected in the histories of women, labor, and Chicago. Prompted by an abrupt wage slash, this strike solidified the identity of these women as workers. Although the strike failed, it became a platform leading to the first women's local in the stockyards in 1902, which by 1904 was a durable organization, the Chicago branch of the national Women's Trade Union League (WTUL). When Hannah O'Day, friends Maggie and Annie Condon, neighbor Annie Killeen, and their coworkers marched out of the Libby plant 'without even a parley,' as Upton Sinclair noted, they were immediately dismissed, blacklisted, and replaced by eager applicants. In time, a 'new union' emerged, which helped lay the foundation for a much larger organization of wage-earning women seeking better working and living conditions. As for the rebellious strikers, the stockyard rising would transform them from exploited canners into women workers with a collective consciousness of themselves as trade unionists and participants in 'women's public culture,' though which conditions of working-class and middle-class activists sought economic and social justice.

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March 11, 2014

Artist Carolee Schneeman's first London solo show has recently opened at Hales Gallery. The show, Water Light/Water Needle, was first performed in 1966 and hasn't been seen since. The Guardian interviewed Schneeman this week about her long career. She and interviewer Steve Rose discuss her most controversial pieces, including Meat Joy and Fuses. "I never thought I was shocking," Schneeman tells Rose. "I say this all the time and it sounds disingenuous, but I always thought, 'This is something they need. My culture is going to recognise it's missing something.'"

Those who enjoy Schneeman's work and want to learn more about her thought processes and her life will enjoy reading her collection of letters, Correspondence Course. The letters, edited by art historian Kristine Stiles, are an epistolary history of Schneemann and other figures central to the international avant-garde of happenings, Fluxus, performance, and conceptual art. Schneemann corresponded for more than forty years with such figures as the composer James Tenney, the filmmaker Stan Brakhage, the artist Dick Higgins, the dancer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer, the poet Clayton Eshleman, and the psychiatrist Joseph Berke. The book sheds light on the internecine aesthetic politics and mundane activities that constitute the exasperating vicissitudes of making art, building an artistic reputation, and negotiating an industry as unpredictable and demanding as the art world in the mid- to late twentieth century. Art Monthly called it "a tremendous achievement on the part of the editor, the artist and the publisher."

Much of Schneeman's work also falls into the category of what might be called "difficult art," which is the subject of Jennifer Doyle's recent book Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art. Steve Rose compares Schneeman's work to more recent pieces by Paul McCarthy, Andres Serrano, and Casey Jenkins, all of which have aroused the ire of viewers and critics. Schneeman says, "a huge wall of taboo remains" about certain forms of art. Doyle argues that while certain forms of art may seem disgusting or off-putting at first, the artists deploy the complexity of our emotion to measure the weight of history, and to deepen our sense of where and how politics happens in contemporary art.

March 04, 2014

Maybe Mardi Gras isn't celebrated in your city, but who says you can't get into the spirit? Duke University Press has published many journal articles on Mardi Gras, and we've made these two freely available for the holiday—so don your beads and mask, cut a slice of king cake, and dive into these articles.*

Milton may be far from mind when one now thinks of or, better, experiences what is advertised as the world's greatest free party. Yet, as we have begun to consider, a rather detailed, even learned usage of literature—particularly English Renaissance and classical literature—played a structuring role in Comus's endeavor to appropriate and dignify the residual Latin traditions of Carnival. Propounding a caste status for its founders that was then more an aspiration than an actuality, a commemorative booklet issue by the Mistick Krewe in 1947 thus explains that 'as the members of Comus were socially important this meant that their celebration of Mardi Gras was orderly, educational and cultural.' (pages 49-50)

Mardi Gras attracts many domestic and international tourists to Sydney during February, and their numbers peak just prior to the parade and party at the end of the festival. The festival, parade, and party are major events on Australia’s tourism calendar. There is a strong representation from countries such as the United States, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, and France, as well as increasing numbers of tourists from Southeast Asia, and Mardi Gras packages are advertised in the gay and lesbian press in European and North American countries. While approximately 15 percent of the eighty events at the festival are free, many of the most popular ones require tickets... Full participation in the festival is an expensive undertaking, especially when coupled with the costs of outfits; body treatments such as waxing, tanning, gym training, hairstyling, and party drugs; and, for tourists, accommodation and transportation costs. Many people are willing, however, to spend large sums because Mardi Gras becomes for them the major yearly event that helps define their gay or lesbian identity. (page 84)